On Visiting Puerto Rico for the First Time

After Yusef Komunyakaa

Damn coquí.
Your high-pitched bleating
for a lover.
Your voices overwhelm
this balcony and pour
into the room−damn
the bed and the room
for not being mine.
Damn the coconuts
and the breeze
that moves them.
The palm trees sway,
cast a spell—a couple clangs
against one another,
laugh, stumble up the street
where my grandmother was raised.
Perhaps they don’t know
they are dying,
or perhaps they laugh
because they do.
Tonight, my mother is dying
and my father is dead, and I don’t know where
I stand in this inheritance.
               Damn the coquí.
I could step
on you if I wanted.
My mother said I would not see you,
but now, here you’ve arrived, coquí.
Small and grey at my feet.
Each toe, a prong,
setting the small jewel
of your body. You’ve been listening:
you hop off the balcony
before I can move my foot

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Daniella Toosie-Watson (she/they) is a poet, visual artist, and educator from New York. They have received fellowships and awards from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, VONA, the InsideOut Detroit Literary Arts Project and the University of Michigan Hopwood Program. Daniella has been published in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, the Cincinnati Review and elsewhere. They were the profile writer for The Kennedy Center’s Next 50 initiative and are currently a Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute. Daniella received their MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program.